Thank you, girls; we’re gonna look back on this moment as a point of significance in your growing relationship.

And Amanda, you’re actively trying to change yourself. That’s one of the most important things you can do, take a hand in the formation of your future, in creating a better person than the person you have already become. Kudos for that; keep at it.

yay for sisterly bonding over a stupid butthole…..and yay for selkie teaching amanda sarnothi cusswords – which is totally realistic! i mean come on, whats among the first things we all learn (and remember!) of a new language? 😉

I can respect this. Both of the sisters are in a rapidly changing world, and are trying to become something new compared to their old way of doing things. I look forward to their family bond growing in the future

Love the character growth of Amanda’s arc, we started off hating her, then feeling horribly bad for her, now we cheer her learning self control. I’m glad Andi told her to count instead of just start swinging, I suspect Andi had some of the same emotional “outbursts” as Amanda. (I know Andi wasn’t physically abused, but her mother is a real piece of work and I bet that led to a bunch of anger problems for young Andi)

Really glad someone else pointed out that Andi is the reason for Amanda deciding to use a cooldown timer. It shows that Amanda actually respects Andi as a parent, and that Andi’s actions are actually leading to positive results that benefit other people and not herself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is how you begin proving that you’re actually being serious about being a responsible parent.

Sometimes you don’t realize you’re in a desert until you encounter an oasis (I used an anecdote like this in one of my fanfics, and it was also regarding relationships). We treat our circumstances as largely normal until someone points out (or we notice) that several other people find a different thing to be normal.

That’s the story of abuse victims, but also…

1. a highly religious child discovering that some people don’t believe in God (or, conversely, an atheist child coming to understand that those who believe in God aren’t just stupid yokels who’ve deluded themselves into following a sky fairy)
2. a child raised with a strong political opinion discovering that the other side of the political fence isn’t uniformly stupid or crazy or evil

3. a child with really supportive parents finding out that that isn’t the baseline (even though it should be)
4. a child with good strong cross-racial friendships encountering prejudice for the first time

5. a person who’s neurotypical encountering a functional adult with Autism (or Down syndrome, or Bipolar, or ADHD, etc.) for the first time — they might’ve been told that these distinctions make it impossible to live any sort of normal life
6. a person who’s able-bodied getting to know someone who’s visibly disabled, or has an invisible disability, or is chronic pain, or otherwise doesn’t fit the able-bodied norm

7. a person who’s used to technology visiting someplace where the internet isn’t taken for granted
8. a person from one culture having to wrap their head around the unspoken norms of another culture, including attitudes about foreigners, strangers, health care, child rearing, weapons, government roles, the elderly, family structures, education, access to fresh water, etc.

I’d say that everybody goes through this, just some more than others. And the reasonable people adjust their viewpoints to account for the distinctions they’ve encountered, and aren’t quick to judge those who haven’t yet encountered those distinctions.

The way it looks when -I- read the comics, is that Mandy always was willing to change if it was her idea, and not someone telling her she Had! to do something. She really personifies oppositional-defiant behavior. And I think this onus belongs solely to the family that adopted her first, with the two lying hateful mysoginistic sadistic terror twins. But that’s just my read on it.

I have been reading this comic for years now.
This is the moment I have been waiting for.
From the moment that Andi told Todd that she had given their child up for adoption (Knew it had to be Amanda) through all the family ups and down, this was the moment (as a father) I waited to see.

“You would not believe how many times the kids ask me how to say poopoo in Spanish. It’s ‘la tierra de la trasero.’ The literal translation is ‘earth of the butt.’ I made it up, but the kids seem to like it.